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THE MUSEUM OF M O D E R N ART fj WEST 5 3 R D STREET, N E W YORK

TELEPHONE: CIRCLE 5-SOOO

FOR RELEASE WEDNESDAY, MAY 15,vlB40

MUSEUM HOURS: May 15 through May 29, 1940 Weekdays, including Saturday, 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. Sundays, 12 Noon to 10 P.M. » Admission price 25 cents, includes admission to.motion

picture program every day at 4 P.M~.

Admission to concert of Mexican music, 2:30 P.MA and 8:45 P.M., May 19—May 29, $1.00 (includes admission to Museum).

TWENTY CENTURIES OF MEXICAN ART OPENS AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Mexican art

aver assembled in this or any other country opens to the public today

(Wednesday, May 15) at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street.

It will be on view through September 30.

The Honorary Committee for the exhibition is composed of the

Honorable Castello Najera, Mexico's Ambassador to the United States;

and the Honorable Josephus Daniels, United States Ambassador to

Mexico. The Executive Committee consists of General Eduardo Hay,

Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico; and John E. Abbott, Executive

Vice-President of the Museum of Modern Art. The Organizing Committee

comprises Dr. Alfonso Caso, Chairman and Commissioner- General of the

exhibition; Prof. Manuel Touesaint; Roberto Montenegro; Miguel

Covarrubias; John McAndrew, Curator of the Museum's Department of

Architecture, who is in charge of the Installation of the exhibition;

and Monroe Wheeler, Director of the Museum's Publications Department,

who supervised the preparation of the catalog, printed both in

Spanish and in English.

The catalo:, in addition to articles by the Mexican authori­

ties who assembled the four different sections of the exhibition, has

an introduction by Antonio Castro-Leal, one of i exico's foremost art

critics. Mr. Castro-Leal writes in part:

"For the first time in the history of art exhibi­tions there has now been brought together in one building an authoritative and systematic collection of Mexican art, from the archaic cultures to the most recent schools of painting. The exhibition is divided into four sections. The first, Pre-Spanish, has be^n assembled by Dr. Alfonso Casr-, internationally known authority on Mexican archaeology

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and Director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The second, art of the Colonial period, has been entrusted to Prof. Manuel Toussaint, Director of the Institute of Esthetic Research of the National University, a man of unsurpassed knowledge in the field. The thi'ni section is devoted to Folk Art and has been organized by the distinguished painter, Roberto Montenegro, former director of the first museum of popular art founded in Llexico (1934). The fourth section, modern art, has been arranged by Miguel CovarruMas, famous caricaturist an(i painter, who has understood so well the restlessness of our time....

"Pre-Gpanlsh Sculpture: Pre-Spanish art in Mexico served a religious function. It was not content to^copy the external world, whose visible forms were for it no more than an outward testimony of great inner forces. It created original compositions, using real elements with an almost musical freedom. It is not a crude art.... The ancient Mexican artist was deliberate and skillful.... One marvels at his plastic feeling and at his powers of decora­tive composition....

"Colonial; After the Conquest, the Indian worked under the direction of the Spaniard. In cutting stone he Instinct­ively sought simplifications of form, or elaborated decora­tive compositions. When, as building increased, the in­digenous artist was given greater freedom, the classic ar­chitectural orders, for example, began to lose their purity. There appeared, either rudely or subtly, a distortion of traditional forms, and they became the vocabulary of a new kind of expression.

"An ability to compose with richly complicated forms is shown in the more extreme expressions of the Mexican baroque. Church facades, altarpieces and the decoration of interiors reveal in their exuberance of carving, gilding and accents of color a perfect idiom for the new Mexican spirit. But over this rich profusion, a coherent order dominates.

"Folk Art: All peoples embellish their objects of daily use and evolve similar types of designs, combinations of primary colors, simplified straight-line textile patterns and stylizations resulting from a primitive inventiveness or imposed by the use of similar materials or tools. All this is found in Mexico, and whoever knows the folk arts of Europe will not fail to discover similarities between certain Mexican objects and their equivalents in Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Sweden.

"But one is astounded not only by the abundance of beautiful objects that the Mexican people make, but by the quality of esthetic achievement in so many of them. The simplest Jar surprises at times with its beauty of propor­tion; in the decorations of Guadalajara pottery the poetic sense of composition and line reminds us of Persian prints; and a softness of tone and happy decorative inventiveness make the Talavera of Puebla akin to the ceramics of China.

"To this feeling for beauty, at once naive and refined, the Mexican adds an abundant resourcefulness and an almost Asiatic capacity for minute detail. He has also a certain Ironic subtlety and a strange pleasure in the macabre, sur­prising to the foreigner but inherited from the days when the idea of death was a constant concern for both the Indian and the Spaniard.

"Modern: During the greater part of the nineteenth cen­tury, Mexico dedicated all her energies to consolidating her independence and seeking new forms of social Justice. After the Liberal flood had swept away Maximilian's Empire and

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the Conservatives, it subsided, and lt3 residue acted as tne breeding ground for the pollution of the Diaz dicta­torship. In 1910 the people rebelled, and after a ten-year struggle, won again the right to feel truly Mexican. Art rebelled also; far from the academic tradition, paint­ing tried new paths and found new tasks worthy to perform.

"Great mural painting begins in Mexico after the Revolution. Having already given proof of his artistic ability in the delicate lines of Pre-Spanish reliefs and in the religious pictures of the Colonial period, the Mexican was ready for the notable achievements of the mural paintins of today....A wave of social fervor, of passionate convictions, and of beauty animates the forms of the great Mexican frescoes....

"These frescoes belong to everyone and were painted for everyone; the artist, bound to portray subjects of national significance, tried to tell in masterpieces what he thought and felt about his country and his people....

"On Mexican walls were v/ritten the life of the people and the history of the nation, the silent tragedy of the humble and the sordid ambition of the wicked. Shining above all, was the hope of a bettor world.

"It was not a vaunting of mere propaganda, or of showy posters vaunting the politicians of the moment. This painting was the perfect union of a strong art and a living thought—art and thought which, as in the great periods of the past, were nourished by the anxiety and the longing of the whole people. Diego Rivera drew the life and the history of the country with a richness of composi­tion, a formal harmony, and a sense of mass and space that . no one has surpassed in our time. Jose Clemente Orozco, penetrating yet deeper, painted with a generous cruelty and a rough tenderness the bold and broken symbols of con­temporary wickedness, truth everlasting and that innate tragedy that seems to be part of the Mexican soul. With these men, there came a whole new generation of painters.

"Mexican mural painting of the twentieth century is not only Mexico's greatest contribution to the art of our time but one of the most vigorous and original contem­porary esthetic manifestations."

The three gallery floors of the Museum and the greater part of

the Museum1s sculpture garden are filled with several thousand ob­

jects of Mexican art.

The ground floor galleries are devoted to Pre-Spanish sculpture,

pottery and Jewelry of the Maya, Totonac, Olmec, Tarascan, Aztec and

other cultures. Most of the sculpture is in the form of ancient gods

and ceremonial objects and is carved from basalt, andesite, limestone,

Jade and other local stones. The smallest of these figures is a

tiny silver Aztec owl's head only half an inch across. gallery of the

In the sculpture garden Just beyond the glass walls of this A

SO&Bi is the largest piece of sculpture in the exhibition, the

gigantic nine-foot statue of Coatllcue (goddess of the Earth and

Death). As the famous original of this sculpture weighs two tons,

the figure in the garden is a plaster cast which has, however, all

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the monuiiientallty and grandeur of the ancient f 1 ;ure of stone which

could not be moved from the National Museum in Mexico City. Near

Coatlicue is the reclining figure of an Aztec god, Chac-Mool, with

followed abdomen makin-; a receptacle for blood used in human sacri­

fices. There are two dozen other pieces of Pre-Rpanish sculpture

ftl8o displayed in the garden.

At the entrance to the second floor stand two figures in

polychrome and -lit wood sculpture—the Virgin Mary and St. John.

These are from the Colonial period, as are the paintings—the c;old

and silver reliquaries, vessels and other objects in ftold and silver

on the second floor. One unusual exhibit is a pair of beautifully

wrou^t silver sandals for the statue of a saint. There is also a

lar e ;roup of Colonial lacquer bowls and platters, and a gallery

devoted to Colonial architecture.

The galleries on the rear of the second floor, overlooking

the garden, are filled with a *;reat variety of folk art.

The Folk Art Section continues in the galleries stretching

the rear length of the third floor in displays of costumes, masks,

toys, musical instruments, textiles, ex-voto paintings on tin and

other objects of folk art. The last gallery of this section contains

popular painting and leads into the work of modern professional

painters of the 19th century.

Following these in the next gallery is an alcove of carica­

tures and political cartoons. The most important of these are by

G-uadalupe Posada, who is by some considered the greatest Mexican

artist of the 19th century. Because of the vitality and graphic

quality of his work he has been an inspiration to many contemporary

artists. Anions the Posada items are amusing prints he made for

postmen and other civil servants who used them as reminders of

holiday sifts.

The exhibition continues in a ~roup of Revolutionary

painters. The remaining salleries across the entire front of the

third floor show the work of contemporary artists. Miguel

Oovarrubias, who made the selections, has included particularly the

work of Mexican artists of the past ten years, many of them aB yet

little known in this country. In the decade from 1930 to 1930, modern

painting in Mexico was concerned chiefly with Revolutionary subjects

but during the last decade the subjects preferred by the painters are

0f a naore general nature: figure compositions, Mexican scenes, and

gurrealist fantasies.

One Important part of the Modern Section of Twenty Centuries

0f Mexican Art is devoted to frescoes. Three original Rivera

frescoes will be shown: Agrarian Leader, Zapata, 1931; Sugar Cane,

1931; and Liberation of the Peon, 1931. About twenty-five frescoes

by other artists, impossible to exiiibit here in the original, will

he represented by enlarged photographs.

One large gallery in the Modern Section will be devoted to

the work of Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera, generally considered the

three foremost artists of modern Mexico. The works in this gallery

in addition to two of the Rivera frescoes, include such important

paintings as Orozco1s Zapata and The Sob by Siqueiros.

In addition to Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera, other noted

Mexican artists included in the Modern Section of the exhibition are

Tamayo, Merida, Montenegro, Covarrubias, Chariot, and Frida Kahlo.